"We
require a central organizing principle - one agreed to
voluntarily.Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvement in laws
and regulations,rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change -
these are all forms ofappeasement, designed to satisfy the
public’s desire to believe thatsacrifice, struggle and a
wrenching transformationof society will not be necessary."-
Al Gore,Earth in the Balance

The
Great Shift

Environmental activists often
claim that modern human civilisation is ‘destroying the earth’
and our harmful activities are overwhelming Gaia’s ability to
regenerate ‘herself.’ As discussed in my article about
the Club
of Rome(CoR) the concepts of sustainability and
‘ecological overshoot’ were brought to widespread public
attention by the CoR in their 1972 report Limits
to Growth. According to their predictions by now we should
have run out of many vital resources, including zinc, aluminium and
uranium, and be experiencing extreme food and oil shortages.

Despite the obvious failure of their dire warnings to
eventuate the CoR, and a plethora of other environmental
organisations, have continued to proclaim that the planet is rapidly
approaching critical tipping points that will plunge the earth into
an ecological collapse and result in the dieoff of thousands of
species (including us). Of course the most successful tool they have
found to promote this concept is Global Warming. Most other
environmental problems are of a local or regional nature, are clearly
visible, and can be addressed with appropriate regulations. Global
Warming, however, is caused by an invisible trace gas, an essential
nutrient for life, and a by-product of almost every human activity
(even breathing) but, they claim, it will doom us all!

For
more than thirty years the CoR has proclaimed that our modern society
is unsustainable and must be replaced by an “interdependent
sustainable global society, based on respect and reverence for the
Earth.” This theme has become rooted deeply within
the environmental movement. There is now a constant and increasingly
loud drumbeat for CHANGE. This has coincided with a dramatic
escalation in the rhetoric of those eager to pronounce our doom.
According to a recent report the use of the word ‘crisis’
in the mainstream media has been increasing by more than 10% per year
since 1995.

This psychological warfare has been very
successful. Many people now feel afraid and uncertain. They tell us
that soon there will be no more oil, the economy is about to collapse
and our children are going to burn. No wonder people are beginning to
embrace the ‘green solutions’ that they promise will lead
us away from the abyss. Of course this has been the plan all along.
The CoR state clearly in their own words:

“Man
possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most powerful
combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the world has ever
known. He has all that is physically necessary to create a
totally new formof human society - one that would be built to
last for generations. The two missing ingredients are a
realistic,long-term goal that can guide mankind to the
equilibriumsociety and the Human Will to achieve that
goal.”-
Club of Rome,Limits to Growth (1972)

“The
common enemy of humanity is man.In searching for a new enemy
to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the
like would fit the bill. All thesedangers are caused by human
intervention, and it is only throughchanged attitudes and
behavior that they can be overcome.The real enemy then, is
humanity itself."-
Club of Rome,The First Global Revolution (1992)

Fortunately, those pushing
the Green Agenda have already developed a range of alternative world
systems which, they say, will solve the problems that humanity has
caused. These proposals go by various names: The Great Shift, The
Great Transition, A New Green Deal, The Planetary Phase, The Power
Down, The Great Descent etc. However, they all seem to several
elements in common: a global management system for world resources, a
global currency, replacing nation states with regional unions,
population control/reduction, and a return to localised rural
lifestyles.

I don’t have time here to analyse all the
various proposals so I have decided just to take a look at one
concept being promoted by the Club of Budapest (CoB). If you have
read my previous article The
First Global Revolution then you will recall that
the CoB is an organisation formed by the Club of Rome to promote the
cultural and spiritual aspects of its agenda. Likewise the CoR formed
the Club of Madrid to promote its political agenda.

The Club
of Budapest convenes itself under the rather ostentatious title ‘The
World Wisdom Council.’ Members
include the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Mikhail Gorbachev, Arthur C.
Clarke, Mary Robinson, Jane Goodall, Karan Singh etc. The CoB has
established the World
Shift Network which has the stated aim of helping
to transform the planet earth:

“Indisputably
the world is undergoing a fundamental transformational process, a
global change. Which trend the change will follow is in the hands of
those, who have the decisive power to direct and design the change.
Maybe the last minute has come where it is possible to stop
the downward trend and transform planet Earth into the world,
for which the most noble emotional, intellectual and spiritual
abilities of humans are meant. Thus the WorldShift Network is ready
to help giving birth to a new global culture, deeply imbued
with spirit, fully aware of and supporting the evolution of global
consciousness, inspired by love, and preserving and fostering
life.”http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/index.html

Now
this might all sound very nice – ‘inspired
by love and fostering life’, but what exactly would
this planetary transformation entail? Exactly what sort of world have
they planned for you and me? Before we delve into the details of
their ‘new global culture’ I would first like to
remind the reader that they are trying to sell these ideas and hence
they try to make them sound as appealing and idyllic as possible. But
I encourage you look behind the words and try to get a sense of the
real intention. So let’s have a look at the various aspects of
this World Shift:

The
Economy:

“We support
the shift of our economic focus from translational corporate
“fusionism” to regional subsistence. Subsistence
economy focuses on a “natural” way of living. This is
not “back to stone age”. It rather means a spiral,
wavelike progress out of the life-destroying habits of today’s
so-called civilization and accepting and welcoming the complexity of
life.

We support the development of sustainable,
decentralized, that is local, high-tech production, combined with
local use of local resources. and the redesign of our monetary system
according to a fourfold model: 1) economy of gifting (a basic
matriarchal feature), 2) counter-trade (barter) economy, 3)
complementary local monetary systems for regional trade, and 4)
unified currency (for example called “terra”) for
interregional and global trade. In our eyes compound interest has to
be abolished. Also the concept of “owning” land must
be
reconsidered.”http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/subsistence.html

Hmmm
... so they want us to live in a ‘subsistence economy’
based on gifting, bartering and ‘natural living’. It
won’t be the Stone Age they happily report – probably
more like the Dark Ages. Compound interest and owning land would be
banned. Capitalism dead at last! No doubt we would all be living in
communes. There would be regional currencies and a single global
currency for inter-regional and global trade. This implies the
absence of nation states in favour of regional unions, probably under
some sort of global government.

Health:

“In
many cultures which have survived "civilization" and
industrialization, now threatened by globalization, healers and
educators (shamans) are looking for the origins of health
instead. Coherence again is the basic idea. This goes parallel with
the postulation of the World Health Organization (WHO), which states
that an essential ingredient to health is a highly developed
spirituality.”http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/salutogenesis.html

Riiiight
... so healthcare would revert back to healers and shamans from
cultures that have ‘survived industrialisation.’ Instead
of a prescription we will be told to work on our
‘spirituality.’

Society:

“We
support the transition from today’s parliamentary democratic
systems to participative democratic civil societies all over the
world, which are no longer ruled by politicians, but wisely
administered by wisdom-educated professionals, based on the
fundaments of egalitarian consensus principles. In a participative
civil society the common guidelines are maintained by parliaments of
prudent delegates, who don’t possess political power, but
present and negotiate the will of their mandating regions
instead.

Participation means to encourage and to empower
everyone who wants to contribute to the welfare of civil society. We
want to reframe the word “citizen” so that we don’t
always have to put “planetary” in front of it to signify
that we speak of citizens of the earth, a privilege we all share by
birth. Civil society in this respect equals the super-organism
humankind.”http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/society.html

OK
… so instead of elected officials that we can toss out, we
will now be ruled by “wisdom-educated
professionals.” No doubt the CoB members consider
themselves to be very wise and would be more than happy to accept the
job. Of course their decisions would be based on ‘consensus’
(hmm … where have I heard that before?). Notice the ‘mandating
regions’ instead of countries or states and the super-organism
humankind (Gaia anyone?)

The
Environment:

“Nature
is an immanent quality of this planet, it is the intrinsic way
Gaia expresses herself. Nature is not outside of us. We humans
are inside of nature, and nature is inside of us. There is nothing
else but nature wherever we look. If we accept that something
like spirit and soul resides in us and if it is true that we don't
consist of anything else than nature, then of course something like
spirit and soul must reside in the tiniest bit and in the whole of
nature too.

In the light of contemporary field concepts and of
an understanding of the whole as an eternal ocean of information,
concepts of segregation and separation appear direly wrong.
The idea from where we start is coherence, taking into account that
we are neural beings who are only capable to think what our embodied
mind
permits.”http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/unity.html

Here
we go … the basic premise behind many of these green
transformation groups is that ‘modern humans’ has
rebelled and become separated from Nature, and we must return and
once again become part of the ‘great commonwealth of Gaia’
(to use Lovelock’s words). To many promoting the green agenda
this is their religion. It is not about science or environmental
protection – it is about implementing their form of New Age
religion.

Culture:

“We
support the shift from brain-focused knowledge, which is based
on the metaphor of problems, to heart-cantered wisdom, which
connects us with values, vision, and knowing. 300 years ago in the
western world Enlightenment discovered individuality and reason and
addressed the magical and irrational beliefs of the crowd, but it
didn’t deal with the no less irrational beliefs of the accepted
religion. Instead Enlightenment has put itself in the place of
religion and created new superstitions like positivism,
materialism, capitalism and atheism.

Now Enlightenment
has to make a second step and open up for ”the physics of
the non-material world“. Also it must integrate the
perspectives of non-western cultures which have been left out by the
first step of Enlightenment or suffered from its colonialist and
technocratic misinterpretation. Different from the world’s
teachings about wisdom throughout time, wisdom itself cannot be
taught. But we can provide the cultural environment in which wisdom
will prosper. This very process is in itself an act of
wisdom.”http://www.worldshiftnetwork.org/action/globalwisdom.html

So
… here we can see that they aren’t anti-religion,
atheism is a superstition. But to them the only true religion is
earth-wisdom (which apparently can’t be taught, only
experienced). We have to shift from using our brains they say, and
are apparently leading by example.

Alright, to summarise this
brief analysis of the ‘World Shift’ being proposed by the
Clubs of Rome and Budapest:

·
We will live in a global subsistence
economy based on local bartering

·
Owning land will be forbidden

·
Healthcare will be provided by shamans and
natural healers

·
We will be ruled by non-elected ‘wisdom
professionals’

·
Nation states will be replaced by
‘mandating regions’

·
Our collective salvation depends on us
returning to Gaia

·
We need to stop using our brains

·
We must ‘open up to the physics of
the non-material world’

If you didn’t
know whoexactly was behind this it would be easy to dismiss it as
the ravings of delusion New Age greenies. But this is the agenda of
prominent world leaders stated clearly in their own words. Scarily,
there are literally thousands of smaller organisations springing up
to help implement this vision. A simple google search for ‘the
great shift’
will result in some very interesting reading. Here are a few
examples:

Interestingly,
the Club of Budapest has recently declared a State
of Global Emergency. They have now decided that we
only have four or five years left to make the Great Shift. I have
no idea what science they base them claims on. It seems they prefer
to rely on ancient Mayan prophecies. I’ll provide a snippet
from their 24-page ‘declaration. You can read the whole
document here.

“If we
continue on our present unsustainable path, by mid-century the
Earth may become largely uninhabitable for human and most other forms
of life. Such a total systems collapse could occur much sooner,
however, due to runaway global warming or other ecocatastrophes,
and/or by nuclear wars triggered by religious, ethnic or geopolitical
conflicts or access to diminishing natural resources. The
macro-trends driving these global threats and challenges have been
apparent for decades and are now building toward a threshold of
irreversibility. The scientific modelling of complex systems shows
that when systems reach a state of critical instability, they either
break down to their components or break through to a higher order of
integral functioning. At these “points of no return”
maintaining the status quo, or returning to a previous mode of
organization and functioning, are not a feasible option.

The
acceleration of critical trends and cross-impacts among them
indicates that the ‘window of opportunity’ for pulling
out of the present global crisis and breaking through to a more
peaceful and sustainable world is likely to be no
more than four to five yearsfrom the end of
2008. This is close in time to
the Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the current world. The
period around the end of 2012 is likely to be a turbulent one for
this and other reasons. Predictions coming from the physical sciences
foresee disturbances in the geomagnetic, electromagnetic and related
fields that embed the planet causing significant damage to
telecommunications and impacting many aspects of human activity and
health. For the esoteric traditions the end of 2012 will be the
end of the known world, although the more optimistic interpretations
speak of a new world taking the place of the old.”

One
of the most deceptive and frustrating aspects of the whole global
warming/energy independence agenda is the implication that we can
retain even a semblance of our modern lifestyles if we eliminate the
use of fossil fuels. At least the Club of Budapest is honest enough
to admit that we would have to revert to a subsistence economy, as
currently experienced in many third-world countries. A very good
article analysing how much energy solar panels and wind turbine can
actually provide is The
Great Energy Delusion written by an engineering professor.
You can read more on the ‘green economy’ here.